JENN WAS SCARED, but the gummy berries helped. She finished the bag. The children finished coloring some sort of battle map. The children were perturbed by the malfunctioning Wi-Fi, but seemingly undaunted by the local news, or the channels of static, or their inability to leave the island. They thought it was a game, and they had a battle plan. Team Wave Blast would defeat the sea monster and save the universe. Unless Mom stood in their way, by making them stay out of the water.
“But we’re water types!” Mason yelled.
“Yeah, Mom.”
“How are we supposed to fight if we can’t get wet?”
Jenn was wary of the beach, with its lingering dead-fish smell and its proximity to whatever tentacled thing had capsized that ferry and possibly destroyed the bridge, and more wary still that the culprit might be the squidinox. The squidinox had tentacle-like appendages. The squidinox grew at an alarming rate. If it appeared, it might lure the children into the water. It might slither onto the shore and twine its limbs around them and squeeze until they popped, like tiny human balloons. It might toss them into its lump, and they would disappear forever. She shuddered. It was terrifying. The briny unknown. The vast ocean. The baffling beasts concealed within its depths.
It was also absurd. The squidinox seemed harmless, at least in its natural habitat where it wouldn’t destroy your bathroom. The squidinox was silly, in both appearance and demeanor, though silliness might be camouflage. The squidinox, at least, was top-heavy. It could not come ashore without dragging that cumbersome mantle through the sand. Even short-legged children could outrun it.
She compromised: They could play on the beach and in the tide pools but could not wade out into open water. The children agreed. They marched out to the beach with all the sand toys and the action figures. Jenn did not bring her laptop, because she couldn’t enforce the no-water rule if she focused on work, and she didn’t feel like she could work with these battleships offshore. But it was awkward, standing there on the beach, no screen, no device in her hand, nothing to confirm and catalog her productivity. She felt exposed. The way she had felt on that summer day thirty years back after Timmy disappeared and she stood by herself in the ocean, all that water all around her, an immensity of water under an even more enormous sky, and she was just a tiny little thing. A girl. Alone. She felt that way again after she had drafted the first installment of Philipia Bay, had sent it to her agent and her agent had sent it out into the perilous publishing world, and she waited and waited to see if publishing would scoop it up, or ignore it, or tear it apart. It was just a stupid romance-action novel. But it felt like it was her out there, bared, defenseless.
Jenn paced and felt nervous and awkward for a while, but eventually she sat. And then her hands, on their own, began to scoop. She scooped a shallow channel through the sand. The channel intersected a tide pool and became a canal. Then she had a shovel in her hand and she was digging, widening the canal, building a hole.
“Over here, Mom,” Evie directed. She pointed with her foot, and Jenn dug in the designated spot. She filled buckets with wet sand and plopped them upside down along the edge of the hole to make towers. She collected shells, delivered them to Evie.
“For the castle.”
“No,” said Evie. “These are for the slingshots. But they’re not sharp enough.”
Jenn gathered more shells, then resumed work on the canal. She dug, and dug, and dug, until her arms ached, and her mind felt a kind of peace she hadn’t felt in a long time.
Until she heard Mason scream.
“Squidinox!”
A gleeful scream. She turned to look. She saw the creature floating in the shallow water, a few feet from shore. Except it didn’t look exactly like the squidinox. It was considerably smaller in size than the squidinox had been, even after it had wrung itself out. It was also a lighter shade—a pastel green in contrast to the original creature’s lime color—and had a different pattern on its lump.
“It’s a different one,” Timmy said. They all stood together on the shore, watching the wave-tossed squidinox. The grooves on its lump were uniform, with no apparent eyes, and yet Jenn felt as if the creature was watching them, staring, eager, like a dog begging for a treat.
“But look,” Evie said, and she pointed at a spot several meters away where another squidinox floated, its blind lump gazing up pitifully at the humans on the beach. Evie was eating Goldfish crackers. She tossed one into the water. The closer squidinox snatched the cracker and deposited it into its lump. The farther squidinox drifted toward it, feelers spinning. Two more creatures appeared in the water nearby.
“Mom! Mom! Mom!” Mason bounced and waved his arms.
Evie shared her crackers. One for her. One for the squidinox.
“Evie—”
“Mermeon.”
“Right. Mermeon. Maybe don’t feed them—”
“But they’re hungry.”
“But…well…”
They did seem hungry, and feeding them crackers did seem like a fun use of crackers, and Jenn wasn’t even sure why she had tried to control the dispensation of Evie’s crackers. Parent reflex ordained the reaction: stifle all the fun.
Evie emptied the crumbly dregs of her Goldfish snack into the water. The squidinox surrounded and devoured.
“We should get more snacks,” said Mason.
“We should get more squidinox,” said Timmy.
Back to the beach house they ran.
Jenn waited on the shore. She hoped the kids wouldn’t let the dog escape. She watched the school of squidinox swim through the shallow water. They swam circles, past the wave break, then back again, appendages feathering around them, strange and graceful. She thought about the circle her own life had taken, from Pearl Island back to Pearl Island, from Timmy Caruso back to Timmy Caruso. How the unbridled future became the static past. How the carefree girl became the beleaguered adult, and everything that once was fun was lost to drudgery, and she went along with it. Everyone went along with it, convinced that it was how things were supposed to be. But maybe the rules that everyone thought they knew were just dumb games that someone made up.
Maybe she wanted to play a different game.
The dog did not escape (this time). The kids returned to the beach with a box of crackers and the Bluetooth speaker. They were stuck on an island with no bridge home and an edict not to test the danger-tentacle-waters, so maybe squandering their snacks on the squidinox was not the smartest move. But that was what happened. Timmy wanted to dump the whole box in the sea at once to get the best swarming effect, but Mason insisted they spread the crackers out so that all the creatures could share. The kids took turns feeding. They tossed a cracker here, a cracker there. As they fed the creatures, jam band music played from the speaker. The creatures drifted toward the music source. More squidinox and little squidoodles appeared up and down the shore, and farther out, drawn by the music and salty snack foods.
The small school multiplied. The whole mass of squidinox began to sway in unison. Their appendages fanned and twirled. They spun around each other, over and under, and sometimes it looked almost as if a pair of lumps converged, melding together for a moment, then spinning apart. The collective squidinox became the crowd at a concert, bobbing, dancing, happy.
The humans on the beach set down their books and their sand toys. They gathered along the water’s edge to watch the strange show. Humans inside the beachfront houses trickled out. Parents ran inside to retrieve snack foods for their kids to feed to the creatures, or rejected the snack food requests, to the tune of whines and moans. People took photos and videos of the squidinox herd. They asked each other the same questions: What are they? Where did they come from? Why are they dancing?
At some point during this odd concert, Jenn noticed the fishing boat. It was about fifty yards from shore. There were four fishermen on board, identifiable at that distance only by the color of their clothes and the variety of their respective sizes. The boat flew three oversized flags—the Stars and Stripes, a yellow Don’t Tread on Me flag, and a black pirate flag with a skull and crossed swords.
On the beach, people noticed the boat. They waved and yelled, “It’s not safe! Stay out of the water.” The lifeguard stands flew red and purple flags, a dual warning for riptides and dangerous marine life. People had heard the news about the capsized ferry, and the mayor’s warning. Stay out of the water. The fishermen ignored the waving people onshore. They cast their fishing lines.
“Oh no, Mom,” Evie said. “They’re not fishing the squidinox, are they?”
“I’m sure they’re…they’re just trying to catch regular fish, sweetie,” Jenn said, but she wasn’t sure. If there was a creature that could be hunted and eaten, humans would hunt and eat it.
“They can’t hurt the squidinox,” Evie said. “They just can’t!”
They could, and maybe they should. The creatures seemed benign, but also otherworldly, and thus potentially invasive. Their existence raised questions—questions that Jenn preferred to ignore—as to how and why they had come here to the Pearl Island coastline. The answers ranged from the regular if not alarming climate change variety to the mind-blowing interdimensional-portal sort of explanation. Jenn didn’t want to think about either.
“I don’t think that boat should be out there,” Timmy said. He tossed a cracker into the water. An appendage shot up and caught it.
“They’re probably, well—well,” Jenn stammered, “they’re not very far from the shore, at least. It’s not very deep out there.”
“Yeah. But I really don’t think they should be out there,” Timmy said.
“And they might scare the squidinox,” said Mason.
One of the fishermen reeled in his line, but it came up empty. He cast it again. More squidinox and squidoodles flocked toward the shore. They seemed to be avoiding the boat and its radius. When the boat moved, the squidinox moved in the opposite direction. On the shore, children fed them chips and crusts of bread and day-old donuts. Evie took squidinox selfies with the cell phone that Jenn had told her to leave in the house where it wouldn’t get sandy. She recorded a video of the feasting squidinox, and Jenn asked her to send or save it, so she could remind herself later that she had not been crazy, that she had watched the green horde of squid-like creatures dance while her kids tossed crackers and discussed battle plans with her childhood best friend, that the creatures had grown in both number and size, larger and denser with every snack-food bite.
Then they heard a loud crack.
The squidinox shrank. Their bobbing lumps retreated beneath the surface. Their appendages pressed together. The water around them fizzled and frothed, and the creatures themselves seemed smaller, almost as if they had expelled their internal liquids, as had happened in her bathroom.
CRACK.
“What was that?”
“Mom?”
“Oh no.” Timmy shook his head. “I knew it.”
CRACK.
On the boat, one of the fishermen, identifiable only by his rotund stature, reeled in an empty line. He stepped back from the railing. A second fisherman in a sleeveless neon shirt and ball cap had caught his line on something. He tried to reel it in. The fishing rod bent like a soft branch.
CRACK. C-CRACK.
“Knew what?” Jenn asked. But she knew it, too. She had felt it when she delivered the squidinox from her bathtub back to the sea; when its limb suckered onto her skin; when she saw in her mind an encroaching darkness.
That boat shouldn’t be out there.
Timmy stepped back from the shore. He looked afraid.
CRACK.
Evie kept filming, but she clasped her brother’s hand. The humans on the beach stared out at the water. Their eyes scanned for the source of the sound. The water looked darker, murky, as if cloud cover had obscured the sun. But the sky was blue and cloudless.
On the boat, the neon-shirted fisherman pulled against his bowing rod. The rod snapped. He fell back. The other people on the boat huddled near the center, arms out, legs apart for balance, steadying themselves. The boat rocked.
CRACK.
The boat lurched. The fishermen stumbled. One of the men, a skinny guy in a white T-shirt, fell into the cabin. Some red object, maybe a cooler, slid off the deck and plopped into the water below.
The school of squidinox pressed closer toward the shore, close enough that some of them washed up onto the beach. But Jenn didn’t notice the green creatures flopping on the wet sand, or how her children crouched down, picked them up, stroked them gently, like kittens, and tossed them back into the water. No one on the beach seemed to notice, because all eyes had turned to the boat, and the dark shape in the water beneath it.
The water itself looked murky, but there was undeniably some big thing shifting beneath the surface under the boat. The skinny guy who had fallen into the cabin picked himself up. The neon-shirted fisherman picked up his broken rod. He held it like a spear. The fourth fisherman, a short, bald man, hastily buckled himself into a life vest.
For a moment, the boat seemed to hover in a spot of darkness, unmoving, statuesque. The sea was calm, the water flat. The waves sloshed gently at the shore. Jenn held her breath, and it felt as if all the people, up and down the beach, in the boat, on the decks of beachfront houses, were holding their breath, bracing themselves, watching and waiting.
C R A C K
The noise was louder this time. She heard something hard and huge slap against the boat’s hull. The boat turned sharply sideways. Its starboard side dipped down toward the water. Every unbolted object slipped off. The skinny fisherman looped his arm around the cabin doorway. The neon-shirt guy and the round-bellied guy clung to the rail. The short fisherman in the life vest slid across the deck. He grabbed for the rail but missed and tumbled into the water.
The fisherman popped back up, buoyed by his life vest. As he floated there, the boat righted itself, unnaturally, as if something had propped it up from beneath. The three fishermen still on the boat ran to the edge. They tossed a rope with a flotation ring down to their friend. He swam toward it. But before he could reach it, the ring disappeared, and the rope was yanked from their hands. The water churned. The bald fisherman yelped. His arms shot up. His hands reached, trying to grasp something, but there was nothing but air above him. He opened his mouth and let out a gurgling scream as something pulled him down.
On the beach there were gasps, whimpers, screams. Evie whispered ominous narration into her recording phone. Other people tried to call for the coast guard, the police, anyone of authority. Or they trained their phone cameras on the boat and the water around it, slick and still and deceptively empty. Lifeguards clutched the rescue buoys in their arms, their hands clasped over their mouths. Fearless children and panicked adults gathered the beached squidinox and flung them back into the water.
Someone screamed, “Those things! It was those things!”
No one had seen what had assailed the boat. It had stayed hidden beneath the water. But parents told their children to get back, away from the water, away from those things. They commandeered the chips and crackers. Inside, they said, because they didn’t want the kids to see what happened next.
Jenn, in a prior iteration of herself, would have said the same. She would have covered her children’s eyes, and her own. But the kids had already seen. They already knew. And something had shifted inside her. She didn’t know what, or why. But she felt looser, more limber, resilient, and yet solid in herself as she stood on the shore, her feet grounded in the sand, her hair aflutter in the sea breeze. Her body bore the scars of age and time, of childbirth, tragedy and loneliness, long hours hunched at her desk, her heart desperate for the approval she believed existed only outside herself, the favor of the masses, the grand prize of having Done It All. The house-husband-kids-job-fortune-fame. And she did it all. She won. She had achieved those things. Yet the prize itself was a mirage. And if she turned away, if she let her gaze soften, the Great Mt. Achievement dissolved into a wispy mound of clouds on the horizon and there was nothing left but her, this body, these children, the sand and the sea.
The children moved toward her, their small satellite bodies orbiting Planet Mom. Evie and Mason still held hands. Evie had stopped filming. She slid her other hand into Jenn’s hand. Mason’s other hand clutched Timmy’s. The water under and around the boat churned with sinister shapes. Near the shore, the throngs of squidinox shrank and squeezed together. The Bluetooth speaker beeped. Its battery died. The music stopped. The three men left on the boat stood back-to-back-to-back, bracing themselves.
Inside the house, Barry paddled at the window and barked, and Jenn could hear him now, past the wind and waves and dunes. Maybe his canine nose could smell what was coming.
CRACK
The boat wobbled.
CRACK
The boat rocked. Black oily water rippled beneath it.
CRACK
The engine broke off.
CRACK
The three sailors gripped the railing. Their bodies radiated terror.
C R A C K
The bow flipped skyward. The sailors slid back. They grabbed for the rail, but they didn’t slip off, because the stern tilted skyward, too, as cracks appeared through the hull. The sailors fell toward the gaping center. Water gushed across the fractured deck and into the cabin. The neon-shirt fisherman reached up and pulled himself atop the flooding cabin, then higher, toward the bow. The potbellied fisherman tried to follow, but his arms lacked the strength to hoist his body. He climbed partway, but then the boat shook and he slipped back down, between the jagged pieces of deck. Water gushed over his body. His hands reached for the rail, but he was too far. There was nothing to grab or hold. The water poured over his head. He was gone.
C R A C K
The boat rocked again. The skinny fisherman clung to the railing near the stern, his lower half dangling in the water. The boat shook, and then it split in two. The bow side stayed pointed upward, the cabin sinking slowly. The stern side rebounded. It was sinking with the deck parallel to the sea. The skinny fisherman reeled himself onto the deck, first his hips, then legs, then knees, until only his foot hung over the water. Then something—a tendril, a tentacle, a vine—sprang from the water and coiled around his ankle.
It was too far to see the thing clearly from the beach. It looked dark, but it might have been any color. From afar, it only looked like a line, reaching up from the water, circling his leg.
The skinny fisherman screamed. He kicked. He tried to break free. The thing reached up his leg, a ribbon of darkness around his lean flesh. Then it pulled. Hard. It whipped him around. It flung him through the air. His body hit the water with a smack. Then he was pulled straight down and was gone, too.
The last fisherman, the one in the neon shirt, watched his buddy disappear. He decided to take his chances. He kicked off his shoes. He dove into the water, as far out from the boat as he could get. A moment later, he popped up several meters from the sinking ship. He took off, swimming as fast as he could toward the shore.
Evie squeezed Jenn’s hand. She tensed. She whispered, “Come on, come on, come on, come on!”
The fisherman’s legs fluttered. His arms spun. His hands pulled. He propelled toward the shore, a few meters, several meters more, a quarter of the way, halfway. He might make it, Jenn thought. He was fast, swimming furiously, barely stopping for breath.
Then, in an instant, he vanished.
“No!” Evie cried.
“Where is he?” Mason whimpered. “Where is he? He’s gonna make it, right?”
But he was gone.
The boat sank. The ocean surface was flat and empty. The dark patch beneath the water rolled away. The squidinox still huddled close to shore, but they began to spread and disperse.
On the shore, people had already begun to assign blame.